Mock-up final NOTW front page by Adam Westbrook

With yesterday’s announcement that the News of the World is going to be printed for the last time this coming Sunday, now I’m outraged.

There’s a disgusting irony in that the closure of the paper – with the loss of 200 direct jobs – has been prompted by the sustained campaigning of the political left; the people who have a political mission to save jobs have caused a whole bunch of jobs to be lost. Not just any jobs, though – innocent jobs. Remember, the phone hacking scandal took place 5-10 years ago – none of the people who are losing their jobs this weekend were responsible for what took place back then, indeed, of the people losing their jobs this weekend only about five of them (according to the News of the World’s outgoing political editor) were even working for the paper at the time of the scandal. 200 innocent jobs are being scapegoated in order for The People of Twitter to feel like they’ve secured an historic victory, sticking it to The Man.

Yes, 200 innocent jobs – one thing I missed out of my post on Tuesday was my increasing cynicism about being told to be outraged by Twitter; more often than not (and I’ve been guilty myself), when Twitter tells me to be outraged about something on the Monday, information which comes out by the Wednesday reveals that there are other important aspects of the story which put a different slant on the outrage. So whilst this Tuesday, Twitter was effectively calling for the News of the World to be shut down, once it secured its victory we learn that different slant. Whilst the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the News of the World at the time the criminal activity started who must surely have not only been aware of what was going on, but must have signed off on it, escapes (so far, at the time of writing) completely free.

The 200 jobs which are being lost on Sunday were not responsible for the phone hacking scandal – those 200 jobs were the people responsible for uncovering Sarah Ferguson’s flogging time with her ex husband Prince Andrew to people hoping to gain business advantages as a result of such meetings; they were the people who proved corruption within FIFA and who uncovered the corruption within Pakistani cricket.

As an educated middle class left-leaning person, I’ve never been a fan of the News of the World’s editorial style or stance, but one less newspaper for sale on Sunday is hardly of benefit to our society. Much as my hyperlocal blogging friends like to see themselves as plugging the gap left by the gradual withdrawal of the mainstream media from local journalism, a few possible high-profile examples aside, keen amateurs simply don’t have the skills or resources to undertake the kind of sustained investigative journalism needed to keep those in power accountable to those who aren’t – and to those who are calling for more statutory regulation of the media, do you really think a State-regulated press is healthy for democracy?

There’s also the question of the wider effects of the News of the World’s closure – although a mere 200 people were directly employed by the paper (some of whom may get the opportunity to apply for other jobs within News International), the paper has been reported as being the most widely read newspaper in the English language; as well as the direct employees, there are also the indirect employees – the paper suppliers, the distributors, the newsagents and other shops – who will lose a significant portion of their livelihood overnight.

So, do we feel proud of ourselves?

Venn diagram by Mr Wowser

What’s that, you say? That since I don’t normally buy the News of the World (or subscribe to any other Murdoch media products), and my rubbish isn’t taken away by the council anyway, that me proudly declaring my boycott of them is a completely empty gesture?

Well, quite. And ultimately, that is why boycotts fail, and why calling for boycotts is usually an empty gesture – because the people who call for them are far more often than they aren’t not actually customers of the Bad Company(tm) in question in the first place, and if they’re customers of another company in the group rarely do they extend that boycott to their own purchasing when to do so will cause themselves more than the slightest inconvenience. I suspect many of the people calling for a NOTW boycott – who are also extending their outrage to the whole of News Corporation and calling for Rupert Murdoch’s intended purchase of the remainder of BSkyB that he doesn’t already own to be blocked – are also Sky subscribers. For their outrage to be genuine rather than empty, they’ll also be cancelling their Sky subscriptions and suffering a bit of personal inconvenience – that’s what a boycott is about, not about telling other people not to do what you don’t already do anyway.

Similarly, those who call for a boycott of companies involved in the disputed territories of Israel/Palestine actually have it quite easy – there’s bugger all that they might want to buy in a shop which is actually produced there, so ultimately the boycott of standard retail goods boils down to looking at the label to see where one’s avocado comes from. And not buying SodaStream any more, for anybody still living in the 1970s. If one really wants to take a stand, if you live in a municipality which uses Veolia for rubbish processing you’ll opt out of the council’s rubbish collection and take personal responsibility for disposing it elsewhere (and probably not to the council tip, because that itself is probably operated by Veolia as well). I will however allow them to continue to have their sewage taken away by t’Corporation (even though a lot of the specialist valves used are manufactured in settlements in the disputed Golan heights) – emptying my own toilet myself on a twice weekly basis is one of the few aspects of my own lifestyle I wouldn’t wish on others.

As an aside to the boycotts issue, I must confess to be now suffering from Twitter Outrage Fatigue Syndrome; I’m sure back in the olden days of Usenet outrage was there (especially in the darkest corners of the talk.* hierarchy), but it seems practically a day doesn’t go by without half of Twitter telling me to be outraged about the latest outrageous thing. Frankly, I think the phone hacking scandal is a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s an outrageous thing. The arms trade, the ongoing banking crisis, and our government’s continued eagerness to spend money on wars which should be spent on the NHS, they’re worthy of outrage. I’m even inclined to be more outraged that two Birmingham MPs are campaigning to relax the ban on smoking in pubs. Dodgy practice by a handful of journalists 5-10 years ago is not remotely on that scale.

Stickers by Dave Briggs

They’re not just fab because I’m one of them; next time you hear of some politician or crappy journo talking about lazy council workers who do bugger all for their inflated salaries, consider that these people all gave up half their weekends – most of whom if not all not getting any pay, time off in lieu, or even train fare to be there – because we’re passionate about our jobs, and we’re passionate about learning from one another to do our jobs better, and thus provide you, the hard-pressed council tax payer, with a better service as a result of it.

What was also fab about the people and the event was – whilst everybody was appreciative of what everybody else had to share – I didn’t feel any evidence of what I have to admit I’ve started to become a bit… uncomfortable about when I read my Twitter stream. Charitably, some of what shows up can be described as groupthink, or uncharitably sometimes what manifests is a bit of a, um, how can I put this, don’t be offended when I, erm, say a… mutual backslapping society. There, I said it – oops. If you’re reading this as a member of the local government web community, you’ll have almost certainly often seen a Twitter post from somebody declaring they’ve just read an excellent blog post by the excellent somebody-or-other, which has an excellent comment on it made by the excellent somebody else.

Now I’m all for acknowledging excellence, but when everything which is said is excellent and everybody who says it is also excellent, where does that leave something which is even better? When everything is excellent, nothing is excellent; in fact, when everything is excellent, everything is in fact mediocre – if every link you tweet is excellent, the busy reader will probably end up following none of your links.

But more importantly, if everything we say is deemed by our colleagues to be excellent, heard uncritically and unchallenged, then that serves nothing but the very trend towards mediocrity which we’re all trying to work against. Nobody likes to be told they’ve had a crap idea, but sometimes clever people really do have crap ideas, and nothing’s worse than those crap ideas being turned into crap projects; few things are more career limiting than being associated with a crap project which wasted a whole bunch of public money, especially if the project could have been avoided or improved simply by somebody acting as a critical friend.

It also, admittedly, can be a bit disconcerting to see conflict within a close-knit group on the modern internets; when Dave Harte wrote a piece last week critiquing a statistic presented (off-hand) by Dan Slee at a conference describing social networking usage vs traditional media reach in his area, I think I’m not the only one who read it and thought ‘oo, ouch…’.

But we’re all grown-ups here, and even though some of us have digital footprints going back nearly 20 years it’s not like any of us are n00bs at this online discussion gig thingy.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we should start behaving like arseholes to each other, arguing the toss for the hell of it like the very worst corners of Usenet used to be like. But we should feel more comfortable than we perhaps do to respectfully challenge each other, to be critical friends, rather than allowing everything to pass unchallenged, uncritiqued.

And perhaps have a little less of the excellent-ness?

Now, being in the making-things-and-trying-to-sell-them game myself, I’m certainly not going to defend the big corporate borg with fancy expensive lawyers ripping off the little person who, if they making a living selling their work at all, they’ll only just be making a living and almost certainly unable to afford to take a multi-national to court over it.

However, we have been here before. In February 2010 the internet rip-off scandal was about how Paperchase had ripped off another indy designer‘s artwork to put on some notebooks and carrier bags.

But when the bottom of that story was reached, it turned out that Paperchase had done no such thing, themselves – instead, it was a designer in an agency contracted by Paperchase who had done the ripping off. And so it’s highly likely that Urban Outfitters themselves didn’t rip off tru.ch, rather one of their suppliers did the ripping off. This is how multi-national corporate retail works – just as Nike don’t actually make their trainers any more, Levis don’t make their jeans any more, Paperchase, Urban Outfitters, and all these similar shops don’t actually design and make anything – they just buy product in from third party suppliers.

So whereas of course Paperchase and Urban Outfitters should be the first port of call for the aggrieved designer to say ‘oi!’ to, immediately organising a mass internet campaign for a boycott is a bit silly – Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t do the ripping off, they just accepted what they were given by their suppliers with the reasonable assumption their suppliers were providing them with legit product. In the Paperchase case, they – albeit after some time – investigated and pulled the product, which Urban Outfitters will almost certainly so do as well.

Now you might think it a bit off that both Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t immediately pull the product after the first email from the designer, but let’s be realistic – how realistic really is it for a multi-national megacorp with hundreds of branches in nearly every country in the world and at tens of central administrative offices to receive an email from anybody off the street and just take action on the spot? Whoever receives the first email has to work out who to forward it to, then that person has to read it (in between however many meetings they have that day), then delegate it to somebody else to read again and possibly do some research to verify the truth of the original complainant, write a report making a recommendation to the buying committee, wait for that committee to meet (assuming the report gets on the next agenda), etc. You’ll be lucky to get just those steps achieved in a month, let alone whatever else needs doing.

And the tru.ch vs Urban Outfitters case turns out to contain more story than the original blog post let on – news and aggregator websites Apartment Therapy and BoingBoing took up the story, only for both articles to be filled with comments from people claiming to have seen stuff like the disputed items for five, ten, twenty years, suggesting that tru.ch was hardly selling an original idea in the first place. Indeed, Regretsy has even found examples of other people selling the designs before tru.ch did anyway.

The moral of this tale is – when somebody on the internet tells you to be outraged about something, always pause and check some facts first.

Here are the videos of the talks (with apologies for the sound quality in what was a rather noisy coffee bar):

Dan Slee talks about Walsall Council’s #walsall24 twitterthon event

Kate Sahota talks about the idea of a forthcoming transport data hack day

Andy Mabbett talks about GLAMDerby, Derby Museum’s WikiMedia collaboration

Part one:

Part two:

I was there, and thought that since I was there with my video-capable mobile phone I might as well video it, and indeed stream the video live to the interwebs for the benefit of the people who were inevitably seeing all this otherwise random commenting appear in their Twitter streams. Here are the videos!

Philip John talks about videoing council meetings

Simon Whitehouse leads a discussion on public sector redundancy

Darren Caveney talks about how Walsall Council has started using Yammer

All volunteers to transcribe the videos welcome!

The design inspiration is taken from the look of classic broadsheet newspapers such as the New York Times; I’ve gone for a layout which is fundamentally three colunns, flexible width, with the home page (and archive pages) middle main column split into two further columns below the first post.

The theme is widgetised galore – the left column is a thinner one, for eg category navigation, and the right column being wider for eg the list of recent comments, tag clouds, and other content widgets. As with many WordPress themes there is the footer widget area. The home page also supports four further widget areas – an area at the top of the centre column for eg introductory text, with two further areas in left and right columns below the WordPress Loop for whatever you might want, and a final widget area full width at the bottom of the centre column – you could perhaps add a slideshow widget in there.

The Loop (home page and archive pages) is configured to show the most recent post on the page in full across the full width of the middle column, with subsequent posts shown as excerpts (including Featured Image thumbnails) in the two columns below – for this reason, you will always configure the theme to show an odd number of posts rather than an even number (so change the WordPress default from 10 to either 9 or 11!).

The theme is designed to be good for both accessibility and for search engine optimisation – any areas in which it falls short of these goals, then please do politely point that out in the comments below! As with most WordPress themes, it was developed by building upon core files in a skeleton theme – in this case, Automattic’s Toolbox. Accordingly, it is also HTML5 (though what you choose to put in the widget areas may almost certainly break the semantic purity of the HTML5) and also has some built-in microformat compatibility. CSS3 KurvyKornerz(tm) and a blog nameplate delivered using a dynamically downloaded font (Cloister Black) complete what might be described as modern web features.

The changelog for the theme will be included in this article, and questions and comments can be put in the comments; at this stage, the only theme updates I have planned are minor variations to get the layout pixel perfect (such a state as is actually possible to exist on the interwebs, of course) and to tidy up the css to remove the redundant classes which have crept in, but I’m open to suggestions within the skills I have – and, of course, as with all GPL work feel free to fork it into something of your own if you like.

At Birmingham City Council we have for a long time had a page on our website detailing information about school closures due to snow, but this year we felt it would be good to go a bit further, and provide information (in as near real-time as possible) about other disruptions to services – including traffic and travel on buses and trains actually outside the council’s responsibility – to try to create a one stop shop for people needing it; the target customer profile we adopted for the service was somebody either about to leave for work in the morning or thinking about when to leave for home in the afternoon, needing to get all the information they can get as effortlessly as possible in order to help them make their decision about what to do.

Although we have our main content management system solution for our website, for this service we chose to use one of our corporate WordPress installations – partly in order to spread the traffic load between this subsite and the main site, and partly because WordPress, at its core a blogging engine, is particularly ideal for providing constantly updating information, and allowing intuitive navigation of content through categories and tags.

Our first task was to sort out a WordPress theme for the site. Although we’d already made the decision in advance to take this route, the snow still managed to come earlier than we expected, right in the middle of another workstream we were engaged in! So I plumped for the basic – and currently default – Twenty Ten theme as a starting point, to then customise for our own needs: curvy corners and changing the header image into a background image in order to make the subsite in keeping with our main site’s branding, and re-organising the layout into two equal-width columns – the left hand column being the widgetised area for more or less static content, and the right hand column holding the main WordPress Loop for each individual information update aka blog post, whilst at the same time my colleague organised the subsite’s graphics. Because of the nature of the information, I also modified the portion of the theme which renders the posted time to make a much more prominent date and time stamp. There are other tweaks which I know I’d like to make – they will come in due course as time allows. Particularly important on a heavy traffic site such as this is the installation of the WP-Super-Cache plugin, in order to ensure performance under high load is as good as it can be.

Theme installation and customisation sorted, it was then time to organise content. Although generally the core of the information to be provided would be school closures, the worst of the snow started falling after the end of term, allowing us enough time to think about expanding the service outside of the particularly fast moving world of schools rather than having to do that thinking in the middle of already hectic activity. Over the course of a few days we built up a library of information source websites, keeping open a dedicated browser window with them all open across a series of tabs. So, for Birmingham, they are:

• The Met Office severe weather warnings page,
• National Express West Midlands (the main local bus company) service alerts page,
• BBC Birmingham travel news page,
• For train information, London Midland, Chiltern Railways, CrossCountry Trains, Virgin Trains, and National Rail Enquiries,
• Birmingham Airport, and
• The Birmingham Newsroom (the council’s own press office subsite).

Working to a fairly loosely organised shift pattern, between the members of the team updating the site we got into a habit of going across the row of tabs refreshing them on roughly an hourly or two-hourly basis to see if anything had changed, and posting that information over into our site where there was significant new news to convey – crediting the source accordingly. A bit of editorial judgement comes into play here – thinking about which piece of information is most likely to be most critical to the most people, we opted to generally make the bus information the most recent post to be added each time in a batch, so that stays at the top of the page. We’re also aware that having multiple similar posts appearing on the front page can be quite confusing, so have got into habit of e.g. with the bus update post, deleting the previous one which the latest one supersedes.

As well as information updates from other sources, there are also our own pieces of information to convey – such as rubbish collection disruption, information about how the housing emergency repairs hotline is responding, and other pieces of advice that between us and our partners we think of offering.

As a metadata structure, we’re using categories to organise our content into the types of information offered – Advice, Other closures, Other information, School closures, Travel, and Weather warnings, and tags according to locations – by Birmingham’s urban towns and villages rather than wards and constituencies – plus Citywide as the catch-all.

When the service went live there was a feedback comments page – initially conceived for people to provide feedback on this specific information service, it very quickly starting being used by the public as a platform to ask questions about why hadn’t their road been gritted. With the best will in the world, fielding comments and queries like these is well outside the scope of both the subsite and the team operating it, so instead the link was changed to point to the main council YourViews form, so that customer complaints can be properly processed by the relevant people.

It has been most satisfying to see the service being used and appreciated by citizens – since the snow started falling on December 13, at the time of writing 10,008 people have visited 14,780 times clocking up 28,416 page views – that’s 10,008 people who’ve hopefully found invaluable information which they otherwise wouldn’t have found at all, or would have had to make a phone call to find. Whether that’s a phone call to the council or a phone call to the bus company that has been saved (‘avoidable contact’ in council-speak), it’s money saved which will help keep other council services running or help stave off bus fare price rises in the future.

We might not have been able to stop the snow from falling or the water from freezing, but at least we’ve tried our best to keep people informed about the impacts of the snow and the ice on their daily lives.

If your council hasn’t been able to offer this service themselves and you run a hyperlocal blog, why not give it a go yourself? Hopefully this account of how we have done it shows that for comparatively little effort you can provide a lot of extra useful information for your locality, thus driving up your own site’s traffic and reputation.

The discussion very quickly descended into a slanging match between representatives of the blogging community and representatives of the local government communications community; and to be frank, neither side particularly distinguished itself well as holding the moral high ground. My comment to the room at that point was that both sides here need to cut each other some slack: local government press and communications officers – recognise that not only are your local blogging community members your organisation’s customers, but also realise that far from being a bunch of annoying geeks they could be powerful advocates for your cause, as most of them do care passionately about raising the profile of the council and stimulating a healthy local democracy; local bloggers – recognise that sometimes, the press office really does need to prioritise dealing with a local radio query about the serious incident which happened in a school yesterday rather the dead badger at the end of your street.

My advice for how you might achieve this increased respect for each other:

Council Press and Communications officers

• Your main local paper may indeed have a circulation of x,000, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those x,000 people are reading the utterances of your favourite public affairs correspondent – indeed, just because the circulation is x,000, don’t forget that almost certainly y,z00 of those purchases are by the council anyway! However, the w00 reading any given local blog are w00 who read every single article – that’s guaranteed influence, rather than notional influence,
• And of the remaining v,000 actual readers of the public affairs correspondent’s articles, u,000 probably think they’re just as idiotic as you do. However, chances are the overwhelming majority of the readership of a local blog – if not entirely in agreement with everything written – will have respect for the writer. You ignore that channel at your peril.
• Don’t let your own instinct for a news story (since most of you may well have been (trainee) journalists before you started working for the council) get in the way of what really might be of more interest to your own customers as a council; sometimes, the dead badger really is more of a priority for local residents than the big story which will be on the local news later.
• Always be open and honest – your local bloggers aren’t stupid; many of them will also have a journalistic background and be capable of spotting bullshit (and commenting accordingly) from half a mile away.
• Be proactive about releasing information – the original aim of the Freedom of Information Act wasn’t that there would be a string of FoI requests every day, the point was to encourage public bodies to release the information before somebody asked for it under the FoIA. It costs you considerably less effort and money to proactively release the information than it does once somebody has made a formal request. And you get to enhance the reputation of the council in the process. If you don’t answer queries asked of you, the bloggers will make a formal request.
• Taking a walk in your opposite number’s shoes is always a highly effective way of building mutual respect. Are you a blogger yourself? Why not give it a try? Consider giving the local bloggers a chance to walk in your shoes – invite them into the press office on work experience programmes! Let them shadow you for a day or two – let them discover first hand the pressures you’re actually under yourselves!

Local Bloggers

• The ‘don’t you know who I am’ attitude never makes anybody look good. Just because you might be a local blogger who’s built up quite a following over the last four months you’ve been at it, you’re not automatically entitled to be granted the same level of credibility as the served-20-years public affairs correspondent of the local regional newspaper. You have to earn your credibility – earn it with the quality of your writing, don’t undermine it with the quality of your complaining about being ignored.
• Do understand that your council press and communications officers do need to prioritise the queries they receive; in an age of cutbacks, where ‘paper-pushing back-office staff’ are being sacrificed ‘in an effort to protect front-line services’, many councils are cutting back on the number of press and communications staff they employ. Think – is your query really necessary? Are you being reasonable in expecting your query to be answered within the hour?
• Take the time and effort to understand your local council’s communications structure. Some councils have combined press and communications offices, some have them as separate functions, and some have press offices which are centralised with the communications officer functions devolved throughout the council’s departmental structure. Is the press office the right place to ask your question in the first place? Might contacting the customer services department be the better route to getting your query answered?
• Before you ask for that piece of information under the FoIA, have you made a polite request for it straight to the relevant person (be that press office, customer service office, or even having checked by searching on the website to see if it’s already published) first? Often your council press officers (or whoever) will be happy to just give you the information you want if you ask for it directly, within a reasonable time – if you make a formal FoI request then that invokes a whole massive procedure which is both time-consuming and expensive. That’s time taken which could have been spent fulfilling other queries or carrying out other work, and money which could have been spent on – for example – improving the council’s website or employing more people to answer your queries more quickly. Only take FoI route when you’re not getting answers by being polite.
• As above, try taking a walk in your council press officer’s shoes. Ask them if you can come into the office for a day or two to shadow them – or even work with them. What, you have a full time job? How committed are you to your local blog – by taking a day or two of annual leave to spend some time working in the press office, you’ll demonstrate that you’re serious about what you’re doing – and will be taken more seriously as a result.

And whether you’re a local blogger or a local government press or communications officer, there’s a wealth of advice and assistance available from the fine people at Talk About Local and Social Media Surgeries.

What have I forgotten to add?

Once the discussion got going, conversation settled around the use of Yammer, as an internal communications tool. Yammer is sort of like a combination of Twitter and Facebook (if you use the desktop app you get an experience very like using a Twitter desktop app, but the website interface has a more Facebook-like experience), but restricted to organisations using the blunt instrument of email address domains.

The value to an organisation of using a tool like Yammer is that staff in one part of the organisation can very quickly get feedback from staff elsewhere about ideas, projects, work-in-progress, whatever. Organisational downsides for organisations using Yammer include the fact that the organisation’s private data is stored externally by a third-party organisation (in the USA), and whilst it’s free to use for the basic package, there is nothing to stop Yammer suddenly deciding to charge for its service – as Ning controversially did – effectively holding the organisation to ransom. Looking more closely at the service it appears that much of the functionality could be replicated – and hosted internally – using the classic WordPress + Buddypress combination. More critical is how effectively it scales from a user perspective. Within the organisation I work, I follow ‘a few’ people on Yammer – chosen broadly because they’re people I know and have a working relationship with. But there are only a small number of those people currently using Yammer – many more and I would be unable to have any meaningful interaction with them.

The discussion then moved on to more traditional modes of social media – forums and blogs – and a perception of their limited usefulness as an organisational tool for internal communication. I suspect much of the experience of this has been of internal social media which has been set up on a Field of Dreams ‘If you build it, they will come’ basis, without much thought about strategy or focus. But if you think about it, a workplace blog is effectively a hyperlocal blog – or depending on the nature and size of the organisation, a series of workplace blogs.

An internal blog which is just a series of communications from the chief executive might fulfill a basic communications purpose, but really will be barely more interesting than those same communications sent out globally by email – and will probably be read by fewer employees anyway because they don’t have it forced upon them. This is effectively the internal communications equivalent of a Livejournal blog – the organisation’s online Dear Diary site, where they unload their woes about having been dumped by their boyfriend, they’re listening to the latest Coldplay album, but really looking forward to the weekend. The better way to do it is to think about what makes a really good blog as a proper piece of actual social media – it has an angle, a purpose, a topic beyond just talking about itself. So for example, a webteam blog might be articles about the latest things we’ve found out about web accessibility, or the really good conference we went to the other week, or the latest hints and tips for the content management system; a transportation strategy blog might include information about upcoming projects, or employee travel discounts or whatever; basically, information which although focussed on readers in the same work area, may have relevance to workers in a different work area – articles posted to a transportation strategy internal blog may also have some relevance to people working in planning, or articles posted to an education internal blog may also have relevance to people working in a library service.

Intelligent use of tagging will make it easier for employees to filter in or out information which is or isn’t relevant to them – by learning about relevant developments outside their direct work areas they become more effective employees, and by learning about what’s going on in the same organisation generally, they become better employees generally. Which is better for them, and for the organisation itself.